Jodie Foster

Jodie Foster is a recurring but selectively seen figure in Andy Warhol’s diaries: an actress whose public image is encountered through an Interview magazine assignment, a meeting with her mother, passing observations about her education and appearance, and the logistical aftermath of recording an interview. These episodes make her significance less a sustained personal relationship than a record of how celebrity was observed and produced around her. Warhol’s attention moves between Foster herself, the people accompanying her, and the media machinery that preserves an encounter without necessarily disclosing what she said.

First Meeting and Public Attention

In November 1976, Catherine Guinness called New York ahead of a scheduled interview with Foster. Foster’s mother initially said that Foster was ill and might not be able to meet them, but after Warhol and Guinness returned to town, Guinness called again and the interview went ahead. They met at The Pierre. Warhol noted Foster’s high boots and hat and described her as cute; he also encountered Ingrid Bergman in the hotel before Foster arrived with her mother and a man whose relation to the family he could not determine. He wondered whether the man was a bodyguard or the mother’s boyfriend, leaving the uncertainty intact rather than resolving it.

The meeting continued beyond the restaurant. Warhol and the group walked to F.A.O. Schwarz, where they looked at toys and he bought some for Foster. She signed autographs, and on the return walk a vendor gave her and Warhol each a large candy cane. The entry places her in a familiar circuit of public recognition—autographs, a prominent hotel, and an outing with a celebrity interviewer—but also records the small, practical gestures through which the encounter became personal. Foster is not simply the subject of an interview: she is accompanied by her mother, receives gifts, and moves through a public space where strangers recognize her.

Interviewing Foster and Reading Her Image

When Warhol met Foster again at the 860 Broadway studio in 1980, she arrived with her mother. Warhol described mother and daughter as a tightly joined team, likening their arrangement to a marriage and casting Foster, in his own impression, as the father. That comparison records Warhol’s interpretation of their dynamic, not an independent account of the family relationship. His other observations likewise show how quickly he read a public figure through visible details: he called Foster intelligent, noted that she dressed in a boyish way in Brooks Brothers clothes, and reported that she had been accepted by every college to which she had applied except Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, from which she was still waiting to hear.

Warhol’s remarks about Foster also place her alongside other performers without reducing her to a conventional ranking. While discussing an interview with Nastassja Kinski, he judged Kinski interesting but less fascinating than Foster, and said Foster spoke six languages and could redo any Ingrid Bergman film. The comment is Warhol’s appraisal, rather than a scene from Foster’s interview, but it indicates the kind of intellectual and performing range he associated with her. The diary thus preserves an image that is not confined to youth or appearance: Foster is also presented as intelligent and unusually capable, even though the record offers little direct evidence of her own words or viewpoint.

Recording, Transcription, and the Limits of the Record

The 1980 encounter became a taped interview, and its later transcription supplied one of the diary’s clearest glimpses of the work behind publication. Warhol asked Brigid Berlin how she was progressing with the tape. Berlin said she had been working on it for hours and described being at the point where Foster was looking around the office. Warhol knew that Foster and the group had been at the office for only the first two minutes, concluded that Berlin had barely begun, and shouted in frustration. The episode does not disclose the substance of Foster’s answers. Instead, it reveals the distance between a recorded meeting and a finished text, as well as Warhol’s insistence that the material be turned into usable copy.

That gap matters because the diaries themselves were made through a process of recording, recollection, and editorial shaping. Pat Hackett took notes during regular weekday calls with Warhol, typed the entries, and sometimes incorporated later additions or corrections. When either of them traveled, notes, phone calls, and occasionally recordings helped ensure that the days were still entered. Hackett later removed much of the interpersonal dimension of her own conversations with Warhol and adjusted the few personal references she retained. Foster therefore appears through several layers of mediation: an interview conducted for Interview magazine, a tape awaiting transcription, and Warhol’s spoken account as rendered in a diary edited for publication. The record is specific about the circumstances around Foster but deliberately incomplete about the interview’s contents.

A Figure Framed by Performance and Risk

A separate 1977 entry places Foster in a more alarming circumstance without making her the direct target of the reported threat. After the Academy Awards, Martin Scorsese told Warhol and Fred Hughes that he had received a note threatening that he would die one minute after midnight if Foster won the Academy Award. It was already 2 a.m.; Scorsese said he was going to work alone on New York, New York at MGM. Warhol recorded his own paranoia about the situation. The diary does not establish what happened to the threat or whether Foster won the award, so the episode remains a report of a conditional threat relayed by Scorsese, not an account of an outcome involving Foster.

Taken together, the entries show how the diary’s portrait of Foster is assembled from encounters and reactions rather than from a continuous biography. At The Pierre, the focus is on an interview appointment and the people around it; at the studio, on her education, clothes, and partnership with her mother; afterward, on the stalled transcription of her recorded interview. Even the reported threat reaches the reader through another person’s account and Warhol’s anxious response. Foster’s importance in this material lies in the contrast between her recognizable public presence and the limited access the diary gives to her private perspective: she is repeatedly noticed, discussed, and recorded, while her own voice remains largely outside the surviving account.